Personalization Trends Shaping 2018
What shifted in personalization during 2018: GDPR forcing a rethink of consent data, more customer data platforms and personalization fatigue among users.
2018 pulled personalization in two directions at once. Regulation and public scrutiny made businesses more cautious about the data feeding it, while the tools to act on that data kept getting more capable. Here’s what moved during the year.
GDPR forced a rebuild of the data foundation underneath personalization
With GDPR enforcement beginning May 25, 2018, a lot of personalization built on loosely collected behavioral data suddenly needed a clear lawful basis to keep running. Businesses operating in or selling to European markets had to audit what data their personalization depended on and, in many cases, rebuild consent flows before they could keep using it. Some personalization tactics that had spread without much scrutiny for years didn’t survive the transition intact.
Customer data platforms emerged as the plumbing personalization needed
Marketing teams increasingly recognized that fragmented data, purchase history in one system, email engagement in another, on-site behavior in a third, was the real bottleneck limiting how well personalization worked. 2018 saw growing adoption of customer data platforms built specifically to unify that data into a single customer view, distinct from the older data management platforms that had focused mostly on anonymous, cookie-based advertising data. This was less a flashy new feature than infrastructure work, but it’s what made more advanced personalization possible for businesses that invested in it.
Cambridge Analytica made consumers noticeably warier
The Cambridge Analytica scandal, breaking in March 2018, put a public, uncomfortable face on what “using your data to influence you” could look like. Consumer trust in how companies used personal data took a visible hit over the following months, and personalization tactics that had felt clever a year earlier started reading as invasive to a more skeptical audience. Marketers who had treated more personalization as an unambiguous good started weighing customer comfort more explicitly.
Personalization fatigue became a real phenomenon
As personalized emails, retargeted ads and dynamic recommendations became ubiquitous across nearly every brand a consumer interacted with, some of the novelty wore off, and with it some of the effectiveness. A recommendation that once felt attentive started to feel routine once every retailer was doing the same thing. Businesses that had leaned entirely on the fact of personalization, rather than the quality of it, saw diminishing returns over the course of the year.
AI-driven personalization tools became more accessible
Machine learning-based recommendation and content-personalization tools, previously the domain of large retailers with dedicated data science teams, continued moving downmarket through vendor products that smaller marketing teams could deploy without building the underlying models themselves. This didn’t replace the rules-based personalization most small businesses still relied on, but it widened the gap between businesses that adopted predictive tools and those that didn’t.
What it added up to
The businesses that navigated 2018 well weren’t necessarily the ones with the most advanced personalization technology. They were the ones that treated the year’s regulatory pressure as a reason to build a cleaner, more deliberate data foundation, rather than a reason to retreat from personalization altogether. Quality and consent-based data, used thoughtfully, started to matter more than sheer volume of data used aggressively.
More from the Marketing Analytics archive, everything published in 2018 and the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
